High off her win at the Green Fashion Competition, award-winning designer Carrie Parry decided to drum up buzz for her vibrant, Bauhaus-inspired Fall/Winter 2012 collection in a wholly different way. Instead of hiring professional clotheshorses to model her wares, Parry whisked her delicate silk crepe dresses and brilliant color-blocked separates off the runway and onto a flock of feisty girls from New York City, where the garments are produced. More than a lookbook, the result is a celebration of the people Parry creates her clothes for: fierce, feminine, and flawed—but proud of it!—real-life women.

ALL THE REAL GIRLS

Parry was inspired by the clean lines and geometric shapes of the Bauhaus movement, as well as the unbridled colors of Holi, a Hindu festival that celebrates the arrival of spring, she tells Ecouterre. “I love the way that color is everywhere in India,” she adds. “It has so much meaning and vibrancy.” Despite their thematic disparity, Parry managed to tie the two influences together, enforcing a quiet discipline to the otherwise wild palette.

Parry was influenced by the Bauhaus movement and India’s Holi festival.

As with past Carrie Parry collections, “Leharia” is produced ethically and locally in the United States. The fabrics used support indigenous artisanal communities, such as the Panchachuli Women Weavers in the Indian Himalayas, who are able to earn fair wages while keeping time-honored skills alive for future generations.

It was this spirit of community that led her to invite regular New Yorkers—including Ecouterre’s own Yuka Yoneda and Amanda Coen—to star in a pictorial feting the looks. (Kestrel Jenkins, a former contributing writer, styled the outfits.)

To make the experience even more personal, Parry enlisted the Self-Portrait Project, which set up a specially rigged photo booth that allows the subject to take her own picture.

“The Self-Portrait Project is all about empowering people and giving them the opportunity to take their own photo,” Parry explains. “It allows people to be the photographer and the model and I thought that it would be a great way to shoot a lookbook and show the individuality of everyday women.”